3 essential sales skills

Successful selling

Successful selling

Regularly I find myself on the receiving end of a pitch of some sort, as do all in business. We all buy and sell on a daily basis, and whilst  there are easily recognisable and specialised functions that buy and sell on  behalf of our organisations, we nevertheless are “pitchers”, and “pitchees” every day.

It seems that one of the impacts of digital communication has been to help us forget, or perhaps brush over some of the foundation sales skills honed over the millennia of human activity, so here they are again:

  1. Listen rather than speak. Asking questions, listening to the responses, and then asking the follow up questions has always been, and will always be the best sales strategy.
  2. Benefits not features. When you are speaking, talk about the benefits of your offering to the “pitchee” rather than reciting the features. Customers are really only interested in what value a product is to them, not what the range of features may be, so focus on value to them by demonstrating how your product makes their life easier, more efficient, and more productive.
  3. Deliver useful insights, knowledge, and intelligence. Being of value to a customer is more than just flogging product, it is also about articulating the context in which the product will be used to add value.    Clearly however, there is a line here with confidentiality, any potential customer who hears what their competitors may be doing from you will never trust you again to keep their confidence, but the best sales people are always able to deliver solutions  to problems they have collaborated to articulate.

Easy to say, often hard to do.

Risk and A/B testing

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A/B testing

As a marketer, I am fairly left brain oriented, some may say flakey and opinionated, and I have done well with that for many years.

Here is the paradox.

You can now test just about everything if you try hard enough. All sorts of ads, headlines, copy size, placement, colour, the best mix of paid and organic media, channel A Vs channel B, and so  on. There is no longer any excuse not to test, to quantitatively know what works best, to be able  to calculate with a pretty good level of confidence the outcomes of some marketing activity.

There are also some great resources to help think about the topic, Avinash Kaushiks blog being gold, as well as books like “A/B testing: The most powerful way to turn clicks into customers”.

There is a trap here however.

Reliance on data to inform decision making can become a crutch that stifles the left brain driven capacity to connect logically unconnected dots in some new way.

Years ago I was faced with a dilemma.

I just “knew” that rectangular 1kg yoghurt tubs would be better than the existing round ones, better for the retailers, better for consumers, just lousy for us as the producer, as margins were at risk from the higher costs, or volumes at risk from higher prices had we chosen to recover all the incremental costs.

Problem was that the round ones were industry standard, and were so for a reason, they were substantially cheaper, easier to print, and all the filling and collation equipment was designed for round tubs. I had to wait 6 years to do an A/B test by subverting a capex process of an equipment upgrade in a factory  by substituting rectangular tubs for round. Not a simple proposition when you consider all the supply and distribution angles that had to be covered.

Outcome: rectangular was vastly preferred by consumers (I somehow  “knew” that) and retailers as they achieved better shelf utilisation, which we were able to calculate and demonstrate to them. It turned out the cost premium was easily recovered in the incremental sales, and the dynamics of the market were changed in a fundamental way.

I could have, probably should have, lost my job for that piece of subversion, and had it tanked, I am sure I would have, but it would not have gone ahead with full disclosure in the capex process.

Some things are still really hard to digitally A/B test, you still need the market instinct and market risk taking mentality to have a go, but the personal cost has the potential to blow out in the wrong environment, but without the risk, there is no progress

How retailers can read the consumers mind.

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Businesses spend many millions trying to understand the way consumers consider the choices confronting them in a supermarket. With up to 30,000 items on shelf, and some categories having hundreds of choices, it is a key consideration.

A mix of psychology, data science,  habitual behaviour, discretionary spending dollars available, and individual preferences all play a role.

A complicated mix.

However, there is a way to at least clarify part of the mix.

Consumers use decision trees, usually without thinking about them when they are in a supermarket making their purchases.

Some purchases are automatic, a habitual choice, others are made after a considered set of choices on a range of factors important to the individual are made, and there are, obviously, many shades of this continuum that apply to a highly personal process.

Imagine a consumer approaching the dairy case looking for fruited yoghurt. Some may just buy their usual brand, flavour and size irrespective of everything else. Others will make a series of choices that will vary for every person, and may look something like the decision tree below.

Decision tree It will differ for each individual, some will choose the brand first, others the flavour, or the size and price, and a whole range of variations on these factors, but based on the total sales, supermarkets will range products, and give them shelf positions and space based on sales, gross margins, delivered margins, and various promotional strategies. They also use a decision tree.

Retailers and suppliers spend huge amounts of effort, and resources.  on this category management exercise, trying to read the consumers mind, and anticipate their reactions to various combinations that are available to them.

It is a data intensive exercise, well suited to the “big data” techniques that are evolving around us. Combining checkout data with store loyalty cards is now becoming commonplace,  what is emerging currently is the integration of mobile and social media data into the mix.

As you walk into the store to buy something, there has already  been lots of effort gone into reading your mind, and there will be lots of effort and money expended in store in an effort to manage your purchase decisions.

Outside-in innovation

meadow lea

My early days of marketing were as a minor part of the team that created Meadow Lea, the brand that completely changed then dominated the margarine markets for the following 25 years. I was really just a young gopher, but the lessons that came with those successes, and the trials in  between, were scorched onto my brain.

10 years later I joined a major dairy company as marketing manager, and the first thing on my list was to do to ourselves in the milk business what Meadow Lea had done to the butter market.

Shock, horror, Sacrilege!!.

It was even illegal.

Pulling the dairy fat out of milk and replacing it with vegetable fat had been enshrined as illegal in legislation, which was  not about to change because some marketing bloke thought it was stupid, and could see a commercial opportunity.

Even the technical staff of the business thought I had gone stark mad, or at least drunk too much at lunch with the agency (it was the eighties after all) and refused point blank to do any development.

Farmers Best It took eight years, but eventually Farmers Best was launched, and whilst not becoming anything like the Meadow Lea blockbuster I had envisaged, certainly prevented anyone else having a go.

My point, not all the good ideas come from the domain you inhabit, from your people, or even your branch of technology.

Looking outside for ideas, technology, and innovation in all its forms, is not just sensible, but in these days of homogeneity and rapid dispersion of ideas and techniques, it is essential.

And the law? well, it was quietly changed as it had became obvious that consumers did not give a fig what sort of fat it was, they wanted  the benefit of lower cholesterol and resulting longer life.

10 X 8 Framework for a content StrategyAudit

Content 3

These days with the ubiquity of mobile and social, almost everyone is a media channel.

Recognising this simple fact changes the formula for media success. In the old days, the formula used so successfully by mass marketers was:

Money X mass media = Sales.

This used to work, no longer, now  that media has fragmented into thousands of pieces, and individuals have a personal menu of media consumption based on their interests, time, and competing priorities in their lives. The formula marketers now have to use is something like:

Time X tailored and personalised media = a chance for a sale.

Much more uncertain.

In this context, spending some time considering the productivity of the investment being made in social media, and you are making them, even if it is just the employee who spends some of your time checking their facebook timeline, would  be useful.

Following is a framework you might like to think about. The reality is that it is little different from a normal Marketing Audit, is it just that we are focussing on social and the content that fuels engagement.

Social media competitive analysis.

  1. What are we doing?
  2. What are direct competitors doing?
  3. What are the successful Social media attention grabbers doing?
  4. What kind of content are our competitors producing and distributing?
  5. How, where and when are they distributing?
  6. How are competitive strategies performing? A. In keeping their customers engaged, and, B. In attracting other customers, including ours
  7. Where do we have opportunities?
  8. Where are we under-performing?
  9. What can we do to restructure our activities within existing capabilities?
  10. What capabilities do we need/should be developed?

Content plan

  1. Determine the behavioural and “tone” of the intended audience
  2. Indentify what type of content should be developed
  3. Source and develop the content
  4. Create a content calendar
  5. Develop a set of performance metrics
  6. Build in the expectation of continuous A/B testing, tweaking testing, tweaking….
  7. Build a list of users, and track their use of and engagement with your content, being prepared to personalise
  8. Leverage the list, but ensure that the communication is always personal, and appropriate to the current situation of the prospect.

Repeat all above, again.

Content marketing has become all the rage, there are so called gurus out there selling new brands of snake-oil, and many are extraordinarily good at parting you with your money. However, the simple and fundamental truth of marketing remains: you must add value to your customers lives. Failure to do that results in just having a big bag of fancy hot air, not much use to anyone, no matter how fancy the plan.

Oh, and one last thing about plans that I bang on relentlessly to my clients: You get only 1 point out of 10 for the plan, the other 9 are reserved for implementation.

For a “How to” of an audit of the technical detail  on your site, this post of Neil Patels is a terrific start.

I would value your feedback on how you undertake a content audit, so let me know.